Divide and rule
Whether it was a forgotten underclass or “soft racists” who elected Donald Trump, the real question is: what now?
Whether it was a forgotten underclass or “soft racists” who elected Donald Trump, the real question is: what now?
The notion that Hillary Clinton lost the election because she ignored the forgotten people – the white working class who for years have been running to stand still while the masters of globalisation accumulated wealth on an unimaginable scale – is rapidly achieving the status of conventional wisdom. The subtext is that president-elect Donald Trump can’t be such a bad egg because he didn’t forget them.
Thus the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, something of a journalistic institution, produced a column that, without mentioning
the global financial crisis, birtherism, the glass ceiling, unrelenting Republican obstructionism and vilification or the fact that Clinton won the popular vote, dismissed her and Barack Obama as “incrementalist Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitists who hang out with celebrities” and preferred “cuddling up to Wall Street” to addressing the plight of the forgotten men and women.
When you put it like that, it makes perfect sense that the heartland turned to an East Coast multimillionaire’s son who attended an Ivy League school and is the ruthless, unapologetic personification of the old saying that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”.
Apart from portraying the forgotten people as imbecilic, this thesis seems at odds with the facts. Michigan, for instance, was, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, a central brick in the Democratic firewall that melted when the heat came on. Michigan is heavily reliant on the automobile industry. George W Bush initiated the bailout that saved Michigan from ruin, but Obama carried it through. After initially supporting the bailout, Trump switched to condemnation, claiming things would be exactly the same had no taxpayers’ money been poured into propping up American car manufacturing. (Nearly all the US$80 billion bailout has been repaid.) Before the financial crisis, unemployment in Michigan was 6.8%; at the height of the recession it hit 14.9%; it’s now 4.6%, below the national average.
ALL ABOUT RACE
On Salon, writer David Masciotra, who lives in a “flyover” Indiana town, scorned “maudlin and melodramatic tales of ‘white working-class anger’”. He pointed to the town of Griffith, Indiana, frequently cited as a model of small-town economic vitality. During the Obama years, unemployment in Griffith went from 20% to 3%, yet from early in the election season Griffith was loudly and proudly pro-Trump.
Why? Here’s a clue: Latino members of a high-school basketball team visiting Griffith were greeted with taunts of “build the wall”.
Masciotra harks back to white flight, the phenomenon of white neighbourhoods emptying out when non-whites moved in. That overt racism, he argues, has been replaced by “soft” racism, which is often disguised by demonstrative expressions of tolerance. In reality, little has changed. The soft racist “feels America is his country. The virtue of his whiteness gives him ownership. Should a black president or a Black Lives Matter protest or a Latino presence in his neighbourhood threaten his sense of entitlement, superiority and authority, he feels resentful, even hateful.”
The demagogue’s game plan never changes: scare the people silly; tell them things are going from bad to worse; blame it on the others, those who aren’t like them, those who, if left unchecked, will steal their birthrights; promise to see off these bogeymen and usher in a new golden age. If America’s forgotten people feel worse off even though the facts suggest otherwise, that may be because Trump has preached a message of American decline from his very first flirtation with presidential politics back in the Ronald Reagan era.
If we can judge a man by the company he keeps, what should we make of Trump? He forms a mutual admiration society with Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) and a driving force behind the Brexit campaign, which was as wildly untruthful and unexpectedly successful as Trump’s presidential run. Brexit’s animating spirit and Farage’s political raison d’être is opposition to immigration. Trump’s first policy announcement on becoming a candidate was the promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico to keep out “rapists” and other “criminal scum”; his first declaration of intent on winning the election was a vow to deport “two or three million” undocumented immigrants.
The Trump campaign’s chief executive was Steve Bannon, executive chairman of the alt-right media organisation Breitbart News Network. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, says Bannon was “the main driver behind Breitbart becoming a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill”. It was announced this week that Bannon will be President Trump’s chief strategist and counsellor.
According to reports, as well as being the Don’s consigliere, Bannon plans to oversee Breitbart’s expansion into Europe, where he sees a ready audience/market among supporters of Ukip, France’s National Front, Italy’s Northern League, the Netherlands’ Freedom Party and Alternative for Germany. All are far-right anti-immigration parties.
FORGET THE FORGOTTEN
The forgotten-people narrative suits Trump, Farage and co because it obscures the reality of their “power to the white people” movement. Paradoxically, it also suits some on the left to ascribe Trump’s win to neglect of the salt of the earth because that dovetails with their analysis and policy prescriptions. And in the meantime, civilised debate is drowned out by the alt-right’s strident claims that large-scale immigration is an uncontrolled
If America’s forgotten people feel worse off, that may be because Trump has preached a message of decline.
social experiment and the counter-chorus of “racism!”. It seems obvious that part of Trump’s appeal was his disdain for political correctness. What in another time and place might have been a breath of fresh air quickly became a foul wind.
But in the final analysis, it shouldn’t have mattered that Trump’s message was a collection of dog whistles, some more piercing than others, or that his campaign slogan “Make America great again” was really just code for “Make America white again”. The central and enormously troubling question from this election is how could the greatest nation on Earth, a country that has historically asserted its exceptionalism and higher mission, choose as its head of government and head of state a person so manifestly unfit for either role?
Some months ago, Politico brought together five journalists who have written books on Trump. Their consensus was that he didn’t belong within a bull’s roar of the Oval Office. After the election they were asked if, when they were working on their books, they’d ever considered the possibility of Trump becoming president. Wayne Barrett, who has known Trump since the 1970s, replied: “I thought it was more likely that they would lock him up. I thought he was on the edge all of his business career and that he was destined for trouble – I mean big-time trouble.”
Bemoaning the media’s fixation with Clinton’s emails “scandal”, Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who has covered the presidentelect since the 1980s, wrote that Trump’s “major and lucrative criminal connections” extend to “violent felons, Mafiosi, Russian mobsters, con artists and a major cocaine trafficker”.
By his own admission, the man is a sexual predator; the evidence suggests he has a long history of forcing himself on women. Throughout the campaign, Trump demonstrated by his words, actions and the company he kept that he holds the old civic virtues of decency, civility and tolerance in contempt. At a rally in Texas, he gave a shout-out to the state’s agricultural commissioner who’d called Clinton a “c---” on Twitter; he campaigned in Michigan with unhinged former rock star Ted Nugent, who has described Obama as “a sub-human mongrel” and Clinton as “a toxic c---” and “a two-bit whore for Fidel Castro”.
WHAT ROUGH BEAST
By choosing Trump, the US shrank before our eyes. It turned its back on the old virtues, repudiating Obama’s grace and dignity by replacing him with an intemperate vulgarian. It turned its back on knowledge, expertise and experience, opting instead for populist ignorance. It turned its back on the world, choosing the candidate who espoused an incoherent version of America-first isolationism. It doesn’t seem overly dramatic to wonder if historians will one day look back on November 8, 2016, as marking the beginning of the end of the American empire. Given Trump doesn’t seem to believe in anything but Trump, there’s always the possibility that, rather than doing what he said he’d do, he’ll actually do what he excoriated Bush and Clinton for doing.
Earlier this year, Obama confessed “it’s hard not to think sometimes that the centre won’t hold”. Consciously or not, he was referencing WB Yeats’ famous poem The Second Coming (1919), whose lines foretelling the darkness that would descend on Europe are among the most-quoted in literature: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blooddimmed tide is loosed and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.
The poem ends thus: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Although various people, understandably in some cases, are now insisting otherwise, Trump is a rough beast. But on January 20, 2017, he will slouch into Washington DC to be inaugurated as President of the United States of America.